Club Vogue owner sentenced for tax evasion

A Columbia strip club owner of Columbia was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison on Friday for income tax evasion, said Don Ledford, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney General’s office.

James Andrew Yeager, 37, who was the owner of JR Entertainment and Club Vogue, 912 Business Loop 70 E., pleaded guilty to income tax evasion in October 2006. Yeager failed to report nearly $500,000 of income from 1999 to 2001, Ledford said.

In addition to his sentence, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri ordered Yeager to pay $177,275 in back taxes along with interest and penalties, Ledford said.

In a separate but related case, Yeager’s business partner Dan Bruce Marcum, 51, formerly of Columbia, was sentenced to 5 years of federal probation and was ordered to pay all outstanding taxes on June 26 for charges of income tax evasion stemming from the same investigation, Ledford said.

Marcum, the former manager of Club Vogue, earned approximately $82,105 in 1999 but failed to report any income.

In April 2002, law enforcement officers searched the club and seized several boxes of documents after a yearlong investigation by the Internal Revenue Service’s criminal division, the Columbia Police Department and the Cooper County Sheriff’s Department, Ledford told the Missourian in October 2006.

Ledford said that Yeager’s direction, cash receipts for the club’s dancers’ fees and the club’s portion of the lap dances were not reported to the IRS, Ledford said in October 2006.